Project Based Learning

Project-based learning, or PBL, is the use of in-depth and rigorous classroom projects to facilitate learning and assess student competence. Students use technology and inquiry to respond to a complex issue, problem or challenge. PBL focuses on student-centered inquiry and group learning with the teacher acting as a facilitator.

What is the Purpose for Project Based Learning?

Project-based learning (PBL): best defined as instruction relating questions and technology relative to the students' everyday lives to classroom projects. Students form their own investigation of their own group which allows students to develop valuable research skills. The students engage in design, problem solving, decision making, and investigative activities. It allows students to work in groups or by themselves and allows them to come up with ideas and realistic solutions or presentations. Students take a problem and apply it to a real life situation with these projects.

Project-based learning (PBL) provides complex tasks based on challenging questions or problems that involve the students' problem solving, decision making, investigative skills, and reflection that include teacher facilitation, but not direction. Project Based Learning is focused on questions that drive students to encounter the central concepts and principles of a subject hands-on.

With Project-based learning students learn from these experiences and take them into account and apply them to their lives in the real world. PBL is a different teaching technique that promotes and practices new learning habits. The students have to think in original ways to come up with the solutions to these real world problems. It helps with their creative thinking skills by showing that there are many ways to solve a problem.

How to Structure your Class

Project-based learning(PBL): is an approach for classroom activity that emphasizes learning activities that are long-term, interdisciplinary and student-centered. This approach is generally less structured than traditional, teacher-led classroom activities; in a project-based class, students often must organize their own work and manage their own time. Within the project based learning framework students collaborate, working together to make sense of what is going on. Project-based instruction differs from inquiry-based activity by its emphasis on collaborative learning. Additionally, project-based instruction differs from traditional inquiry by its emphasis on students' own artifact construction to represent what is being learned.

taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project-based_learning

What are the benefits of Project Based Learning?

  • Offers multiple ways for students to participate and to demonstrate their knowledge
  • Accommodates different kinds of intelligence (e.g., kinesthetic, figural)
  • Can be matched to the learning styles of students such as learning alone by reading and reviewing, or learning in a group by reading and discussing
  • Shifts students away from doing only what they typically do. For example, projects provide the means to give followers the experience of being task leaders
  • Encourages the mastery of technological tools. Projects provide an ideal context for learning to use computer technology and graphic arts tools, thus extending students' capabilities and preparing them for the world beyond school
  • Serves as a medium to involve students who don't usually participate
  • Prompts students to collaborate while at the same time supporting self-directed learning
  • Offers a learning experience that draws on the thinking and shared efforts of several individuals
  • Helps students develop a variety of social skills relating to group work and negotiation
  • Promotes the internalization of concepts, values, and modes of thought, especially those related to co-operation and conflict resolution
  • Establishes a supportive and non-competitive climate for students
  • Provides a means for transferring, in whole or in part, the responsibility for learning from teachers to students
  • Allows students to try out new skills and model complex behaviour in a non-threatening fashion
  • Calls upon students to explain or defend their position to others in their project groups, so that their learning is more apt to be "owned," that is, personalized and valued







Make your own lesson using PBL:


Websites for Project based learning:

http://pbl-online.org/
http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning
http://www.bie.org/
http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/pbl.html
http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/index.shtml
http://www.hightechhigh.org/projects/